Teefers.

Biting. I personally never had an issue with my own children biting... that said, I have worked in child care for the last 10 years so it has been an issue in my life at one point or another.

Children start bearing down with their gums before they even break those pearly whites through their gums. The bearing down on objects is actually something that helps relieve pain. But lets starts from the beginning here...

Babies stick everything in their mouth, without necessarily having the intention of biting or eating it. Infants are like little sensory monsters. They want to stare at new objects and touch everything in sight. This is why we baby proof our houses! One of less common spoken of methods of exploring the world is oral sensory. Babies put things in their mouth because it are exploring the object with their tongues, lips, and gums. Try feeling sand paper with your finger tips. It's rough and grainy and scratchy. Now stick it in your mouth. You can literally feel each individual grain of sand with the tip of your tongue. Babies are absorbing their surroundings constantly. Everything is new to them! So everything goes in the mouth. What better way to find out information about an object then to use your most sensitive body part to do so.

Anyway, eventually babies start getting teeth and they start biting. Now, a lot of parents see this as a problem that needs to be discouraged.

It is not. Why? Because babies need to bite things. They spend a lot of their infancy having teeth pooping in and out of their gums and it hurts. Until your child has the cognitive ability to bite someone with the intention of causing pain, their biting is really just teething. Do not punish your baby for trying to relieve pain in their mouth with the only method that is readily available to them - applying pressure to his/her gums.

When your baby bites you or someone else, without having an intention to cause harm, your response should be to stop the baby from doing the activity they were engaged in when they bit you and say "Ow! That hurts me when you bite."

Your next step can be to remedy their teething by giving them something to chew on or administering a medication to help with pain relief.

If you punish your baby for biting you because they are teething, you are not discouraging them from biting. They are biting you because they NEED to bite.

Do you want to teach your baby that their physical needs (biting to relieve pain) are not going to be met? And that on top of not being met, the baby is going to be punished for indulging in behavior that their body tells them that they need to do.